Galaxy S4 Browsermark Score Is Higher than All Current Devices

We’ve already found out that Samsung is going to use an overclocked Qualcomm S600 chip, probably because their own Exynos 5 Octa is not ready for this first half of the year, and because it’s meant to be more of a competitor to Qualcomm’s S800, and because it comes with integrated LTE.

HTC One also uses the S600, but at 1.7 Ghz, as opposed to the 1.9 Ghz version that Samsung is going to use in the Galaxy S4. The S600 is based on the Krait 300 architecture that comes with 10-15% architectural improvements, and of course a higher clock than the previous S4 Pro. Since the S600 chip inside the Galaxy S4 is overclocked to 1.9 Ghz, it should be faster than the S600 in HTC One.

The 2710 score we see above taken with the Browsermark benchmark for Galaxy S4 seems to beat everything else out there right now, although it looks to be slightly behind the Tegra 4 reference board got in the same benchmark:

The Browsermark test checks performance for different HTML5 features as well as Flash, WebGL and so on. However, the difference between the new devices and the old ones still seem surprisingly small to me. So I wouldn’t see this as the absolute benchmark to compare the performance between devices. Plus, just like Sunspider, it seems to depend pretty heavily on the browser it’s being tested on. The LG Optimus G seems to be very close to Galaxy S4 in performance, even though the difference in performance of the chips themselves should be a lot higher.

There’s no way the S4 Pro chip inside the LG Optimus G could be faster than the S600 in the HTC One, unless the difference is heavily “skewed” by the browser’s own optimizations (LG Optimus G uses a custom “stock” Android browser).

Either way, we’re going to have to see more benchmarks for the Galaxy S4 to determine just how fast it is compared to other chips in the market. The CPU seems to be competitive enough, at least for the first half of the year. I’m more worried about the GPU, though. So far we only know that the S600 comes with Adreno 320, the same GPU as the S4 Pro, but we don’t know whether it’s going to be overclocked or not. So that’s one of the things we need to look for when the Galaxy S4 arrives, to see how competitive it is against other devices.